I've been a beekeeper since 2011, and it has been an adventure of discovery, stings and sweet sweet honey! It's not my professional activity, I do it as a hobby afterwork with a friend for fun. We've had ups and downs, with a peak of 40 hives in 2015. It demands a lot of self-control, passion and time. So with new priority like family, we've been slowing it down to 20 hives. However, those late couples of years have been a struggle to keep our colonies alive.
The Honeybee has many predator and sickness, but a new enemy as emerge in my country since 2018, the Asian hornet (Vespa velutina nigrithorax).
They can wipe out a colony in 3 to 5 days if no action is taken (I'll do another post about that later). So we adapt, and our bees too. Like learning new techniques from their eastern cousin : "about 500 Japanese honey bees surround the hornet and vibrate their flight muscles until the temperature is raised to 47 °C (117 °F), heating the hornet to death, but keeping the temperature still under their own lethal limit (48–50 °C)"*.
Finally, last year, with our struggle, we manage to end the season with 15 healthy colonies dispatch on 6 sites before winter.
Each year we anxiously visit our colonies by march, and we usually have 10 to 60% of loss.
Two days ago 14 hives were empty of life... Just one survived.
Never had we so much loss, and others beekeepers among our society had the same dark surprise. And most of the time the hive is empty. So nobody really knows the cause of death (pollution, pesticide, sickness, 5G, Varroa destructor, ...).
But one survived... So we fight back!
Before winter, from this survivor, we can make 3 colonies. With our network of fellow beekeeper, we're hoping to buy at least 4 colonies, and with a little luck some calls from firefighter to take a swarm and save the day. So until the end of the season, we hope to get at least 10 hives back up and running.
Of course, I'm going to blog about it all the way.
Our hopes and morale are up, but if you want to give us a small boost to buy our colonies, feel free to use those addresses below.
Btc :
bc1qx80vnkznd503gsre5amef5gddhkzmd6gkwn7d8vw26vz0gex88rs0xuayg
Stay tuned.
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apis_cerana#Thermal_defense
